Computational complexity of finite asynchronous cellular automata

Cellular Automata (CA) are a well-established bio-inspired model of computation that has been successfully applied in several domains. In the recent years the importance of modelling real systems more accurately has sparkled a new interest in the study of asynchronous CA (ACA). When using an ACA for modelling real systems, it is important to determine the fidelity of the model, in particular with regards to the existence (or absence) of certain dynamical behaviors. This paper is concerned with two big classes of problems: reachability and preimage existence. For each class, both an existential and a universal version are considered. The following results are proved. Reachability is PSPACE-complete, its resource bounded version is NP-complete (existential form) or coNP-complete (universal form). The preimage problem is dimension sensitive in the sense that it is NL-complete (both existential and universal form) for one-dimensional ACA while it is NP-complete (existential version) or Π_2^P-complete (universal version) for higher dimension.